The salaries speak for themselves. The data shows that women in her office were paid 72 cents for every dollar paid to men. Despite the numbers, Clinton and her allies have long-touted her as “a fighter for equal pay.”

The Free Beacon goes on to explain that this is much worse than is typical for the Washington, DC area:

By comparison to a cross-section of all workers in the District of Columbia, women earned 90 cents for each dollar earned by men, a significantly smaller pay gap than in Clinton’s office.

Yawn hypocritical libtards:

Mark Perry, an economic scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively on the White House hypocrisy related to gender pay equality, said that the data on Clinton shows that she is guilty of the same hypocrisy.

A pay gap of 28%! Pretty damning! It’s amazing that people can be so hypocritical and not expect us to find out. But… (you knew there was a “but.”)

You know me. Give me numbers and I ask where they came from. Sadly, the Free Beacon does provide ready access to the data they used or describe their methodology. I have contacted them through both email and Twitter and asked for details, but they have not yet responded.

Even in the absence of that, though, we can make a few assumptions about what they did and decide whether it was appropriate. So, first. Let’s talk about what the pay gap is.

What is a pay gap?

We compute the pay gap by dividing the difference between male and female median earnings by male median earnings. We usually do this for markets. For example, in 2012 the US market’s pay gap was 23% and Washington, DC’s was 10%.

Crucially, earnings are are not adjusted for causes other than employer-focused discrimination. AAWU lists these as being:

college major

occupation

economic sector

hours worked

months unemployed since graduation

GPA

type of undergraduate institution

institution selectivity

age

geographical region

marital status

We don’t adjust when using these numbers because doing so would obscure the answer to the question. That question is this: how does a woman’s earning potential compare to men?

Discrimination is an assumed cause of the pay gap, but discrimination happens in many ways and in many places. Not just individual HR practices.

Controlling for those, gets you closer to the question of how much employers are responsible. After doing that, the AAWU says, the pay gap drops to 7%.

The cause of that 7% is “unexplained.” We assume it consists at least somewhat of direct employer discrimination, although how much is hard to tell. (We cannot count on employers reporting when they are discriminating based on gender.)

The upshot is this: why women earn so much less is a more complex issue, but direct employer discrimination is — based on UUAW’s analysis — only about a quarter of the problem. UUAW does not control for these figures because they are focused on a larger problem.

Why this isn’t fair to apply to smaller employers

Free Beacon compares six years of Clinton salary data to Washington, DC in general. At first that might seem like a fair comparison, but it isn’t for several reasons.

First, Clinton’s staff is a much smaller sample, which means it’s going to be a bit more noisy. Little changes will have disproportionate effects. Stats 101, there.

Second, Clinton is a participant in the labor market, not a smaller version of the labor market herself. The DC market not only includes advisors and administrators and communications directors. It also has IT staff, Metro drivers, theater managers, and more. There should be no expectation that Clinton’s wage gap would track the District’s.

But it should still be close to 0% if she cares, right?

That assumes Clinton can or should correct for every other effect gender has had on the marketplace up until then. Remember, direct discrimination only accounts of 7% of the national pay gap.

But shouldn’t her wage gap be smaller? Like, 7%?

No, because her staff mostly consists of administrative staff and strategists. It’s not representative of the market as a whole, so expecting it to match market numbers is silly.

Then how would we tell?

If you’re looking for evidence of discrimination within a business — even a small business — you need to ask some more pointed questions. I wanted to ask some of those, so this is what I did.

First, I grabbed salary data for April – September 2008 from Legistorm. That’s a much smaller data set than the Free Beacon used. But it’s within the period of time where Clinton’s page gap was the least favorable: 37%.

I then filtered out all employees who did not work through that term. That’s because Legistorm’s numbers are real dollar amounts, not annualized salaries.

This makes this something of a back-of-the-napkin analysis, but I assume blatant hypocrisy would show up in it.

And these are the questions I asked:

Does Clinton hire women into top-paying positions? Of the top five earners, three are female. Those women held the #1, #3, and #4 paying jobs. Of the top ten earners, six were male.

Does Clinton hire women into positions of power and prestige? Yes. Several “directors” are female, as are many “senior advisors.”

Does Clinton hire women in general? Yes. Twenty-nine were female, twenty-one were male.

Where people have the same title, are women paid more than men or men paid more than women? There’s a lot of diversity in titles. Only five titles were shared among mixed-gender groups. Of those five, three have women as top earners in their class.

Things I’d love to ask but couldn’t get out of the data:

What proportion of staff members were part time? What was their gender breakdown?

How do these positions rank in relation to each other?

How closely do titles match responsibilities?

Nevertheless, what I see does not suggest hypocritical pay policies.

Of course, some of the hiring may reflect cultural or structural gender bias. Clinton’s economic and telecom policy advisor was male, as was the defense and foreign policy advisor. The health advisor as well as the education and child welfare advisor were women. That could be chance, but those subjects are stereotypically male and female. Still, this is hardly the pearl-grabbing evidence of policy hypocrisy you might expect.

I do hope the Free Beacon shares their methodology, though. What I’d like to find out from examining the Free Beacon data is:

Did they annualize the pay for people who worked only part of the term? Or did they just use top line numbers?

Did they make any attempt to measure the distribution of pay among the genders?

Did they make any adjustments for position, experience, socioeconomic status, etc?

About that last point: the reason they should do this for Clinton even if the numbers are not adjusted for the market as a whole is so their analysis factors into account the market pressures outside of Clinton’s control.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine that the data would be enough to call Clinton a hypocrite — at least on this issue. Not even UUAW puts the blame for the wage gap entirely on employer discrimination; there’s no reason Clinton should shoulder it all, herself.

The other one is talking about improving access to health care, addressing global warming, adding two years of college and pre-school to public education.

So yes, I worry about the future I will be able to leave my child. It’s just … I guess I don’t blame who Ernst thinks I should.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/21/the-gop-shouldnt-play-the-blame-game/feed/0Virginia’s Jailbird Delegatehttps://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/19/virginias-jailbird-delegate/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/19/virginias-jailbird-delegate/#commentsMon, 19 Jan 2015 12:57:39 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=300Watching Delegate Joe Morrissey is an education. Morrissey is a Democratic state delegate from Richmond, and he’s had a number of run-ins with the law. Most recently, Morrissey was accused of having a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old employee of his law office, prompting multiple felony charges. He entered an Alford plea to a misdemeanor “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” charge, the more serious charges were dropped, and he was given a short sentence.

The state delegate is the one on the left. I understand the confusion.

The political leadership of the state insisted that Morrissey resign, and he did. What happened next is puzzling on a lot of levels.

Morrissey’s resignation forced a special election to fill his seat. So in the same announcement where he resigned, he announced his candidacy for the seat he was vacating. The special election was held January 13, and Morrissey won.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you think voters are asleep at the wheel. It’s outrageous. Except …

It turns out that many people in Morrissey’s district have their own legal troubles. Many of them, no doubt, have made plea deals to lesser charges in order to get on with their lives rather than risk disastrous federal sentences. So Morrissey’s plight looks very familiar to them. Former Mayor Leonidas Young said: “They are willing to give him a second chance. He can even represent them better now. A large number of individuals in the district have had run-ins with the law.”

Morrissey’s assertion has always been that he is being hassled, and if voters in his district deal with similar harassment each day I don’t think it’s unreasonable for voters to shrug off a misdemeanor conviction.

There’s also the small fact that he’s an excellent representative of his district and does more than shake a few big-donor hands.

Morrissey, 57, is popular with voters for doing the simple things that any effective politician masters: He listens, and he responds. He regularly brings students to the Capitol. He holds an annual cookout at his farm in Varina. He obsessively follows up on complaints about road conditions. A constituent’s birthday? It’s celebrated with a letter marking events from that day in history.

“Any effective politician masters.” Ha! Does this sound like your state delegate? Most people can’t even name their delegates. (If you’re a Virginia resident and you can’t, there’s help.) I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a birthday card from any of my representatives. Local, state, or federal. Republican or Democratic. It sounds like there’s a good reason Morrissey commands loyalty.

And his political positions seem to be in the right place:

Among his legislative priorities over the years: restoring voting rights to ex-felons, banning pay-day lending, expanding Medicaid, reviving the one-a-month limit on handgun purchases, increasing the threshold for grand larceny and raising the minimum wage.

That’s all stuff I can get behind. So when his own constituency says:

“People voted on the issues,” Hicks said. “What he did personally, it might have been wrong, but the justice system dealt with that. He was judged on his voting record, not his morality record.”

Well, they have a point.

You might still argue: breach of trust, abuse of power, conduct unseemly of a state legislator. But we just got over watching both Republicans and Democrats insist that despite it all, McDonnell was a nice fella and he’s suffered enough. If that’s the way we’re going to play it in Virginia, the mercy you get shouldn’t depend on how rich the people are who’ve got your back.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/19/virginias-jailbird-delegate/feed/0No cure for Alzheimer’s, but a solid step closerhttps://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/16/no-cure-for-alzheimers-but-a-solid-step-closer/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/16/no-cure-for-alzheimers-but-a-solid-step-closer/#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 13:54:14 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=293You might have seen this headline go by recently:

Exciting, no doubt. According to the Stanford news release, the brain has cells (called “microglia”) that clean house every so often. In Alzheimer’s patents, something — it would take a scientist to explain — causes these microglia to go haywire. I am imagining this as a faulty vacuum cleaner: sucking dirt up off the carpet and flinging it into the air. Probably not accurate, but maybe close enough.

Researchers managed to fix this behavior both with medical treatment and genetic engineering. As a result, Alzheimer’s symptoms in the mice were reduced or eliminated.

But it is mice and these are laboratory conditions, and many promising treatments fail human testing because they turn out to be dangerous in other ways. So yes, there’s a reason to be excited. But we’re still a long way from a cure.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/16/no-cure-for-alzheimers-but-a-solid-step-closer/feed/0Do what you need to do (even if you don’t love it)https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/12/do-what-you-need-to-do-even-if-you-dont-love-it/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/12/do-what-you-need-to-do-even-if-you-dont-love-it/#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 01:52:11 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=276I had a little dust-up on Twitter this evening when someone I followed said it was a parent’s moral duty, for the sake of their child, to quit a job they did not love. I took a bit of offense at that. It’s hard not to read that and apply it to the parents in my life — my own, my friends, myself. Many (if not most) of us setting aside what we love for lesser, more lucrative, work.

I do have a rule against arguing on social media, but this kind of thing pushes a lot of my buttons. It is self-congratulatory and elitist. When you drag parenting into it … well. If I read one more thought piece about parenting I am going to go fucking ape shit.

My parents are still around to speak for themselves, but I suspect they did not love their jobs. I know precious few people who do. There just aren’t that many lovable jobs out there.

I consider myself fortunate — even blessed, and I never use that word — to have a job I like doing work I find interesting. But I am not lucky enough to do what I love. That no longer pays … anything, really. To change gears to what I love would mean a lot of hardship for everyone.

Maybe if I hated my job. But I don’t. I like my job. I’m just not going to marry it any time soon.

The admonishment to “do what you love” sounds like encouragement but is is terrible, oppressive advice. DWYL suggests that people struggling to get by are somehow being lazy. It blames the victims of unsafe working conditions, mistreatment, and systemic exploitation. It’s the human resources equivalent of saying “if you don’t love America, then get out.”

And, of course, there’s also the threat: if your boss goes around saying “do what you love,” and you need that job, are you going to say that you merely like it? Or are you going to pretend you love it?

One scenario a Twitter commenter shared with me worked like this: he hated his job and decided he liked development instead, so he started doing that.

I love it. That’s great. But frankly, if you discover you have a talent and interest in programming computers, you’re starting at the finish line. It’s really, really lucky if what you love is financially lucrative. A developer who discovers at fifty that his true calling is interpretive dance has a much more difficult row to hoe.

In this, Tommy Wiseau was fortunate; despite lacking any significant talent, the former leather jacket importer had a considerable fortune to sink into is film-oriented DWYL quest. Most of us don’t have that option.

And anyway, when he was importing those leather jackets, do you think went “woo, leather jackets” before leaping out of bed?

Me neither.

Let’s be clear, because this is not Twitter and I have the room to be.

You should, if you can, take every reasonable opportunity to do what you love. It doesn’t have to be your job. It can be on the weekends, after hours, at an amateur level, for no pay.

If you can make it your job, by all means do. That’s exciting and you are fortunate. Even if you have to work hard to do it, no doubt luck and the sacrifices of others helped you on your way. You don’t need to feel bad about that, but it would be nice to acknowledge it from time to time.

I get pretty damn close to doing what I love thanks to the sacrifices of my parents. They provided me with the encouragement, tools, and resources I needed. They paid a lot of my education, using money earned from jobs they probably did not love. It is not their fault that when I finally discovered what I really loved the Internet had pretty much destroyed the commercial market for it.

If you are doing what you love, I’m happy for you. If you worked hard for it, I’m proud of you.

If you then start lecturing people about how they have an obligation to do what it takes to get paid for what they love, and that failure is just lack of determination, I will get pissed at you.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/12/do-what-you-need-to-do-even-if-you-dont-love-it/feed/0Can we retouch this to make it look more like journalism?https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/10/can-we-retouch-this-to-make-it-look-more-like-journalism/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/10/can-we-retouch-this-to-make-it-look-more-like-journalism/#commentsSat, 10 Jan 2015 14:08:24 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=269You know, I am kinda sick of getting most of my news from viral sources. That’s why I subscribed recently to my local newspaper. They’re not perfect. But at least they do reporting instead of just rephrasing Reddit posts to maximize outrage.

Case in point: this article by Jezebel’s Mark Shrayber about a school retouching student photos:

Taking their cues from Vogue and Paper, an all-girls high school retouched ID photos to make sure that their student body was looking fly as hell when flashing their papers for discount movie tickets and ice creams.

What’s wrong here?

First, an obvious link to the original poster seems like a grand idea. The OP gets only one in the whole article and it’s on the word “reaction.” Not even the image credit, which just says “Images via Reddit,” gets a link. That’s a little … rude.

Moving on. Shrayber makes a big, big deal over how awful it is to retouch yearbook photos:

And isn’t the whole point of student photos to get a realistic look of what one looked like during their awkward years?

That puzzled me, because the OP is talking about ID photos. Who the hell retouches ID photos? Here in Virginia, we try to make them as ugly as possible. To be fair, if you visit the original post you discover that these were destined for yearbook photos as well. But that’s the only way to learn yearbooks enter into it.

Shrayber indulges in some finger-wagging:

It would also be interesting if someone sat down and figured out if photos of male students were just as edited as those of female students.

To recap: no link to the original poster. Yearbooks come out of nowhere. And Shrayber seems to miss that an all-girls school does not have any boys in it. A real win all around.

A professional journalist, Eric Adler of the Kansas City Star, did some actual reporting. This involved talking to both the school and the photo processing lab in question. (The school blamed the lab, the lab blamed automated retouching software.) But the KCS didn’t link to any of their sources and I’m tempted not to link to them in turn. But in the interest of demonstrating what real journalism looks like, here you go.

Calling Serial a “journalistic procedural”, Philippa Hawker says reporting the story of Adnan Syed while it was being investigated encouraged amateur sleuthing and changed the story as it was being reported. Worse, she says, it obscured the show’s themes of love, loss, and injustice.

Reporting without knowing the ending first is a strange decision, Hawker says:

When journalists work on breaking news, they’re forced to proceed this way, but Koenig deliberately imposed this process on herself.

But I’m not so sure. First, I don’t think she had much of a choice; second, most of the consequences of Serial are the consequences of any high-profile story, and third — well, Serial is a procedural, after all.

Now, we know — because Koenig told us — that she thought she was going to be able to wrap this story up relatively quickly. And then she discovered that she couldn’t. The evidence was too ambiguous, too incomplete. If you are a journalist, how do you proceed?

There are roughly three options.

Choose not to report.

Try to pull the story together and report conventionally.

Put the ambiguity of the story in the foreground.

Choosing the first is a damn shame. If you only report stories you can put a bow on, you give folks a distorted view of how the world works.

Most journalists choose the second. For example: Rolling Stone released an article about sexual violence at UVA while Serial was wrapping up. There are many similarities between Koenig and Sabrina Erdely’s stories: serious accusations, an incomplete investigation, a story stalled. Erdely took a much more conventional tack: She stayed out of the foreground, she structured the story as a single article. And she tried to put a bow on it.

Despite that, there were dramatic consequences, amateurs played sleuth, and Erdely got dragged into the foreground anyway.

Clearly, choosing a conventional approach doesn’t insulate you. Maybe (maybe) Serial’s structure made things worse than they would have been, but many high-profile stories have the same sorts of problems. Sometimes reporting the news makes the news; that’s just how journalism works.

As far as encouraging amateurs to get involved, maybe Serial did grant them special permission. But nowadays no one waits for it, so does it matter?

The one criticism Hawker makes that I think can be tied to structure is that it put Koenig in the center:

It served to emphasise emotional responses and first impressions. And in an odd way, the tone sometimes risked obscuring the very things that the show was dealing with: murder, grief and loss, and the possibilities of a miscarriage of justice. [Emphasis mine. — JW]

But are we so sure that is what Koenig’s story is about? It could have been. Hawker may think it ought to have been. But I don’t think that’s where Koenig was going.

There’s this thing you do when teaching where you work through a problem together by thinking out loud. Serial does that with journalism. We see Koenig try to resist leaping to conclusions. We see her double and triple-checks herself. When she decides she does not have a clear view into her own biases, she calls experts and actually invites them to call her stupid or naïve.

Contrast that with how the “new” journalism works. So much of it is designed to incite and to confirm biases. It encourages leaps of logic and extrapolation from no data at all.

But in Serial, Koenig says:

This is how we process information.
This is how we keep an open mind.
This is how we check ourselves.
This is what we do when we don’t know the answer.
This is what it means to be a critical thinker.

In short: This is how I do my job. If you want to do journalism, this is how you need to do yours.

Right now, we have a lot of people who watch the news, match it up with their own biases and experiences in their heads, and think they know what’s going on. Serial’s theme is that maybe this isn’t the best way to process the world. We need to look more, learn more, understand more. And, when it is all said and done, be honest with ourselves and others when we still can’t come up with the answer.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2015/01/04/serial-doing-it-live/feed/1Resolve not to beat yourself up this yearhttps://www.thudfactor.com/2014/12/30/resolve-not-beat-up/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2014/12/30/resolve-not-beat-up/#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 19:17:12 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=254It’s resolution time again; the time of year where we re-assess ourselves, find ourselves wanting in some way, and resolve to be better people. Not that it ever works.1

For many of us, those New Year resolutions will involve our weight. Every year, I see friends of mine make these resolutions. They start out being very stern with themselves. They post daily weight loss and gain statistics to keep themselves “accountable.” There is excitement about the first few pounds lost. Then distress as weight starts to creep back up or the habit fails to take. Finally, the diet talk stops.

One more failed resolution.

Doctor Michelle May calls this the “Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle.” First we misbehave, then we get all angry at ourselves for misbehaving and resolve to do better, and then eventually we misbehave again.

This cycle is both physically and psychologically destructive. Physically, it encourages starvation / binging behavior which carries its own health risks.

Psychologically, it reinforces a very negative view of yourself. It encourages you to treat yourself as a recalcitrant child, and when you are unable to force yourself (you most likely will be)2, then it reinforces the idea that you make awful decisions and lack willpower.

Calling yourself a stupid or weak might feel like you are taking responsibility for your own failings. And maybe it is. But does it do you any good? If you keep making and failing the same resolutions, probably not.

… I took chances, the more I fought back against the things I was afraid of, and the more that I learned to trust my instincts and to let go of the insecurities and small worries, the stronger I became.

Instead of telling yourself you are weak and need to be constantly watched, shamed, and punished, recognize you are stronger than you think you are.

So this year, skip the weight-loss resolutions. They have a ritual start-date, which is meaningless, and a way you can “fail” them, which is stupid. There should be no time limit achieving anything. Instead, consider Jessy’s approach.

If you need something specifically weight-related, consider an alternative to self-loathing. There’s no point beating yourself up over your weight. If you have to keep beating yourself up, then it’s not working and you really need to find another way.

]]>https://www.thudfactor.com/2014/12/30/resolve-not-beat-up/feed/0Serial: you may now binge-listenhttps://www.thudfactor.com/2014/12/19/serial-you-may-now-binge-listen/
https://www.thudfactor.com/2014/12/19/serial-you-may-now-binge-listen/#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 12:51:07 +0000http://www.thudfactor.com/?p=250Season One of the Serial podcast is now complete, so you can start binge-listening if you’ve been holding off. This podcast is a bit different from the “recorded on a laptop mic in the back room” podcast of many years ago. It is an excellently produced and well-thought-out piece of journalism.

Of course it’s also extremely popular, so some people who haven’t listened to it are patting themselves on the back for not following the crowd.

Two things about that.

First, if you are deciding not to listen, read, or watch something just because everyone is talking about it, you need to re-evaluate your decision-making process.

Secondly, creative people take note: you can work for decades in relative obscurity before suddenly having your breakout hit. When (if) you do, people will sneer at your “overnight success.”

Take it from someone who did not join the Serial bandwagon but who was on it from the start. Not only is Serial itself fascinating, but it is the exact opposite of the Buzzfeed / Huffington Post news culture.

Sarah Koenig is a skilled (Peabody-award-winning) journalist and producer, and she spent over a year researching the story. The story itself is interesting, but it also raises difficult issues about how our justice system works (or doesn’t), the dangers of insular communities, and religious prejudice.

That’s a little less breathless, but we’re not doing any better on the factual front. Also, did you know you can show entirely different headlines on your web page, Twitter, and Facebook? ‘Tis true. Here’s the code where they’ve done it:

The title (top line) is a lot different from the ones being sent to Facebook and Twitter.

Following the trail a little further, Mother Jones’s EurekAlert! source has this headline:

Study: Moderate alcohol consumption boosts body’s immune system

This is technically true but leaves out some important details. (Space limitations, of course. Incidentally, this is why you read articles and not headlines.) One of the authors, Kathy Grant, summarized the research by saying: “It seems that some of the benefits that we know of from moderate drinking might be related in some way to our immune system being boosted by that alcohol consumption.” That is a perfectly sober1 and measured thing to say.

On the other hand, Lead Author Ilhem Messaoudi gets ahead of himself: “But for the average person who has, say, a glass of wine with dinner, it does seem in general to improve health and cardiovascular function. And now we can add the immune system to that list.”

Let’s be perfectly clear. The bodies in question were twelve rhesus macaques divided into tea-totalers and drinking buddies. Only the subset of macaques who a) were given alcohol and b) did not over-indulge showed improved immune response to the smallpox vaccine. You can probably count the number of affected macaques on one hand and still have a finger to gesture at that texting driver.

I say “probably” because the original publication is behind a paywall and no-one lets you see the actual numbers without someone paying through the nose. But maybe you can read it. The headline of the original paper:

The only way that could be made more accurate is if we added “at least two” after the word “in.”

So to recap: A small, animal-based study about how alcohol affects immunizations gets blown up, through successive retelling, to be a potential cure for the common cold. Is it any wonder people are suspicious of “science”?

Update 12/18: A couple of folks who do have easy access to the journal Vaccine wrote to let me know that, indeed, it was four macaques out of twelve who saw improved vaccine response. One person added:

This is marginally more realistic than forcing the monkeys to drink, I guess, but it introduces all kinds of confounding factors.

This kind of research is interesting when deciding what you are going to do more research on, but if you are using this as an excuse to drink more I think you might want to seek treatment.